Furthermore, the concerns Ajax has about his identity have implications that extend beyond his immediate community. His aim is not merely to attain glory but to attain eternal glory. True to the Homeric code, he desires kleos, or the glory that earns him the privilege of being sung about by the poets in a thousand years. Achieving aristeia promises immortality or at least some version of it. What matters is not so much how he fares in this world but how he is remembered by future ages. The temporal considerations of immortality escalate the importance of his identity, which lead him to one inescapable conclusion. By taking his own life, Ajax can erase his final days and reclaim who he is. He can fulfill his destiny. His premise is that he has been dishonored and shamed in this life. If he continues to live, he will always be dishonored. So, by killing himself, he reasons he can reclaim his honor. Once dead, provided that he receives a proper burial, he will be defined not by his interactions with Odysseus and Athena but by his true nature. He will be remembered as a great warrior, a noble soul who restored his identity by courageously confronting and conquering his disgrace. While his reasoning may seem strange to the modern mind and indeed to the democratic ethics of fifth-century Athens, it is perfectly consistent with his worldview.
Finally, the natural superiority Ajax displays paradoxically compels him to accept the limits of human agency in the earthly world. To further diminish his defeat to Odysseus and subsequent humiliation by Athena, he endeavors to disavow as much personal responsibility for his downfall as possible by blaming it on fate. There is in the play a curious distinction between destiny and fate: if his destiny is to be immortalized as a great warrior, his fate is to have an unhappy ending in earthly life. His destiny is who Ajax is, or his essence; his fate is what is predetermined to happen to him during the course of his life. He assumes his suffering at the hands of Odysseus and Athena was prescribed by fate, even though his arrogance invited Athena’s wrath. In fact, upon reflecting on his disgrace, he realizes that his name, Aias in Greek, means “lament.” Sure enough, his final hours on earth could only be described as lamentable. His destiny and fate are at thus at cross purposes. It is through suicide that Ajax preserves the former from the machinations of the latter. Destiny, then, protects Ajax against the vicissitudes of life and ensures that his failures do not undermine his claim to aristeia. It insulates him from the uncertainties of actual competitions and in its own way is a hedge against the possibility of failure.
By contrast, Odysseus’s motives and primary loves lack such specific content. All we know about Odysseus is that timé and kleos are not his overriding desires. He willingly sacrifices them to avoid their inverse. He seeks to protect his well-being and shuns disgrace, even if it lessens the value of his personality. But, the reader acquires little insight into his values other than that his preeminent concern is not how others view him or whether he will be glorified by future ages. Similar to classical utilitarianism, kleos is presumably just one of many preferences that he may wish to pursue. Consistent with the democratic ethic, he still honors things. He honors useful things, however, which may or may not include aristeia and kleos. Other than his dedication to self-interest, there is no absolutism in his thinking. He is simply prudent and calculating and is not uniformly focused on one good or desire. It is implied that he is sensitive to his various needs and weighs and balances them as situations require. If this means he cannot have eternal glory, he at least takes comfort in avoiding eternal disgrace. It is safer to go unsung. Furthermore, Odysseus rejects Ajax’s fatalism and the idea that either his destiny or his fate is predetermined. He defines himself solely by his earthly interactions and takes full responsibility for the meaning of his existence. If he cannot fully control his life, he nonetheless can influence how he is perceived and how the world treats him.
Odysseus and Amour de Soi-Même, Ajax and Amour-Propre
The similarities between Odysseus’s “work for himself” ethic and Rousseau’s amour de soi-même are obvious enough, especially if the former is compared to Dent’s expansive interpretation of the latter. According to Dent, amour de soi-même “signifies a concern, a care, to look to, guard, preserve and foster one’s own personal well-being, guided by a true and clear sense or idea of what the well-being of oneself comprises and requires.”38 Notably, it takes both nonreflective and reflective forms. The former is more primitive and represents an instinctual desire to survive. It lacks social awareness of and typically does not take into account other persons unless they are an immediate threat to survival. Reflective amour de soi-même, conversely, entails a deliberative attempt to ascertain well-being and does so in the context of one’s environment and how a person can thrive in that environment.39 It calculates well-being with reference to others. The only concern of Odysseus, of course, is his well-being. His concession that Ajax is his superior to him with regard to his aristeia, in fact, can be interpreted as an expression of reflective amour de soi-même. Odysseus understands that he must grant Ajax his due if he is going to secure his own well-being.
Dent’s distinction between unreflective and reflective amour de soi-même is also helpful for explaining why Rousseau would not be favorably disposed toward Odysseus. Rousseau knows that he cannot recreate the unreflective amour de soi-même of primitive humans and understands that the desire for well-being is too thin to serve as a moral psychology to support freedom in the modern world. If selfishness is relatively harmless in a life of solitude, it raises numerous problems in collective social living. Indeed, amour de soi-même is just as likely to encourage someone to injure or coerce his or her neighbors as to assist them. As Sophocles’ portrayal of Odysseus demonstrates, individuals who “work for themselves” show compassion only when they reason from a position of weakness. Odysseus agrees to bury Ajax because he can imagine suffering the same disgrace in the future. From a position of strength, however, the same individuals might callously ignore or even directly harm their neighbors if they believed it would promote their interests. Accordingly, amour de soi-même is too unreliable to promote freedom and inspire people to adhere to the general will. It promotes sociability and concern for others only under certain conditions that likely will not exist on a permanent and universal basis. Presumably, by working for himself Odysseus would be one of the free riders that Rousseau must “force to be free.” He is too calculating to consistently submit to the common good and would depart from it if he could identify some private interest that contradicts it. To sustain the general will, people need not only affective ties to their community but also to dedicate themselves to right and justice; virtue must take the place of natural goodness. Petty selfishness will not suffice. This is why Rousseau scolds Enlightenment thinkers: “For vices that show courage and vigor, you have substituted those of small souls.”40
Granted, in Emile Rousseau does make an argument that appears to correspond to Odysseus’s mind-set: “It is man’s weakness that makes him sociable.”41 Compassion and empathy of the sort exemplified by Odysseus, in other words, are crucial for a well-functioning, harmonious society. It is probably best, however, not to read too much into this general similarity. Other than their shared sense of compassion, Emile and Odysseus have nothing else in common. His sense of his vulnerability is supposed to form in Emile a species-based identity rather than an individualistic one. More to the point, his moral psychology is based on amour-propre, not amour de soi-même. It is more aristocratic—it is driven by a sense of who he is rather than how he might satisfy his well-being.
On the other side of the ledger, the aristocratic